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Understanding cryptography. A textbook for students and practitioners. Foreword by Bart Preneel. (English) Zbl 1190.94029

Berlin: Springer (ISBN 978-3-642-04100-6/hbk; 978-3-642-04101-3/ebook). xviii, 372 p. (2010).
The book presents a panorama of modern Cryptography with a view to practical applications. As it is said in the foreword (written by B. Preneel), “it restricts itself to those topics that are relevant to practitioners today” and the mathematical background “is limited to what is strictly necessary and it is introduced exactly in the place where it is needed”.
The book is structured in 13 chapters. After an introductory chapter, Chapter 2 deals with Stream Ciphers and Linear Feedback Shift Registers and Chapter 3, 4 and 5 are devoted to Block Ciphers (Data Encryption Standard, Advanced Encryption Standard and modes of operation with block ciphers). The goal of Chapters 6 to 9 is the study of Public Key Cryptography (RSA, Discrete Logarithm Problem based Cryptosystems and Elliptic Curve Cryptography.
The last four chapters deal with additional cryptographic tools and protocols: Digital Signatures (Chapter 10), Hash Functions (Chapter 11), Message Authentification Codes (Chapter 12) and Key Establishment (Chapter 13).
The book is well written, many examples and figures illustrate the theory and the book’s website offers links and supplementary information. The book also discusses the implementation in software and hardware of the main algorithms described.
At the end of each chapter there are two sections: Discussion and Further Readings (with bibliographical references) and Lessons Learned (a kind of moral of what has been studied in the chapter). Finally a list of problems on the topics of the chapter is also provided.

MSC:

94A60 Cryptography
68P25 Data encryption (aspects in computer science)
94-01 Introductory exposition (textbooks, tutorial papers, etc.) pertaining to information and communication theory

Software:

HIGHT; HECC; PRESENT; mCrypton
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